Hark! We’re back (again). There’s really no excuse for our hiatus but it feels good to have another comic out. We’ve put together a few scripts that are pretty quality and should last us through at least through the rest of the year. One hopes.

Of course, there’s always a deep, dark, underlying ulterior motive when a comic comes back from the depths of the internet void – shameless self promotion!

As it turns out, both Tom and I are separately teaching some workshops in the near future and would love to see some of you there. I know, you’re thinking, “you draw comics, what do you know?” Well, there’s really only one way to find out!

###Influencing Strategy by Design
Tom’s talk is with the inimitable [Luke Wroblewski][1] and is titled, “[Influencing Strategy by Design][2]”. I’ve personally worked with both of them at Yahoo! and I can say they are two of the most influential designers in the company.

They’ve shown that you can do so much more than fit into the pigeon hole typically given to the role of design by leading major product changes and development at a strategic level. As an example, some of the recent changes to Yahoo!’s core search and search assist was largely driven by Tom. Best of all, the workshop is being put on by our friends at [Involution Studios][9].

###Communicating Product Concepts with Comics
My workshop is one you may have attended at [IASummit][3] or [CanUX][4]. Many of you may have seen my shorter, 45-90min talk that describes the methodology I teach. The workshop is called, “[Communicating Product Concepts with Comics][5]” and is a refined version of previous workshops with some high quality notes to accompany them.

The workshop is happening at the [User Interface 12][6] conference held by Jared Spool (and incidentally also features Luke and other great speakers). You can see my [slides][7] from my shorter talk or go to my [resource page][8] on my personal blog to get a better idea of the content. Oh, and registering with the code CHENG will get you a discount!

We’re both really excited about these speaking opportunities and hope to see some of you there. If you’ve attended any of our stuff before, we’d also love to hear what your thoughts and suggestions for improvements. If you haven’t attended and might, maybe you can drop a line about what you hope to learn so we can incorporate it.

As a final aside, we completely missed OK/Cancel’s 4th year anniversary. Of course, given the dismal output of this year, it feels almost like cheating to even celebrate it so I’m ok with us missing it. Be here for our paper anniversary though. Who knows, maybe there’ll be paper comics involved. How 1.0 of us.

Hi~ I’m going to iA Summit 2008. I’m bummed that I picked Design Patterns over your Communicating Product Concepts with Comics pre-conference workshop. I’ve tried to switch over the phone but it’s too late. I’ll try again when I register at the hotel.